Slashdot Mirror
Silk Road 2 Founder Dread Pirate Roberts 2 Caught, Jailed for 5 Years (vice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2015, WIRED published a list of the 'dark web drug lords who got away.' That list included the Dread Pirate Roberts 2 (DPR2), the creator of the second Silk Road site, which launched almost immediately after the FBI ended the first with the famous arrest of founder Ross Ulbricht. Under DPR2, Silk Road 2 went on to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. The FBI shut that one down too and arrested its remaining administrator. By that time, DPR2 had already passed ownership of the site on and, publicly, it looked like he had evaded prosecution.
But today, a court in Liverpool, England, sentenced Thomas White, a technologist and privacy activist, for crimes committed in part while running Silk Road 2 under the DPR2 persona, among other crimes committed under another persona. White pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering, as well as making indecent images of children, and was sentenced to a total of 5 years and 4 months in prison. White's arrest took place in November 2014, but the case has remained largely under-wraps because of the UK's strict court reporting rules, which prohibit journalists from covering cases before their conclusion. This is to stop suspects facing "trial by media," and in order to let cases run their course.
But today, a court in Liverpool, England, sentenced Thomas White, a technologist and privacy activist, for crimes committed in part while running Silk Road 2 under the DPR2 persona, among other crimes committed under another persona. White pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering, as well as making indecent images of children, and was sentenced to a total of 5 years and 4 months in prison. White's arrest took place in November 2014, but the case has remained largely under-wraps because of the UK's strict court reporting rules, which prohibit journalists from covering cases before their conclusion. This is to stop suspects facing "trial by media," and in order to let cases run their course.
Inconceivable!
Inconceivable!
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Conducting criminal transactions on a website.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
>If we've learned anything from all of the major drug kingpins that have been taken down over the years, it's that putting them in jail will stop the drug trade.
Good point! Let's expound that logic a little more:
If we've learned anything from all of the major money launderers that have been taken down over the years, it's that putting them in jail will stop money laundering.
If we've learned anything from all of the major child pornographers that have been taken down over the years, it's that putting them in jail will stop child pornography.
I mean, why bother? You think arresting this one guy is going to stop these crimes? Foolish!
White’s motivation was a mix of financial gain and power, Chowles believes. Chat logs between White and Benthall said White planned to start a paid-for child pornography site to make money, Charles said. White would tell Benthall to work on a UK timezone and write in a particular way, the investigator added.
One...Two...FIVE!
They fucked it up when they called it "Dread Pirate Roberts II". It was supposed to stay Dread Pirate Roberts, from person to person.
Also, people can still buy drugs, despite the fact that there are thousands of drug dealers in prison already.
There are drugs that people can legally purchase, made by drug dealers that know how to bribe, I mean lobby, the government.
In states where marijuana has been made legal for recreational use, no one selling marijuana is considered a drug dealer.
The drug dealers are all made up. The drugs are all made up. The whole thing is a sham. ARRRRRG!
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
How much did Silk Road 2 itself make? The article says "hundreds of thousands of dollars a day", but that seems to refer to the total money in transactions.
Because if DPR2 was making that amount and only got 5 years in prison, this isn't a deterrent -- there'll be long lines of people wanting to make that deal.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Which is worse, trial by media or trial in secret? I'm sure that there are subtleties here that I'm missing by being an American, but I wonder...
As a fellow American, I think the subtleties you're missing here are that:
A) Contrary to the two extremes you presented, the Brits struck a middle-ground: temporary privacy.
B) The danger of secret courts is that they undermine actual justice by preventing the public from even having an awareness of the actions of a judiciary that is supposed to be serving their interests. In contrast, having privacy until the case concludes has no such problem, because the judiciary will be scrutinized and held to account for its actions in a timely manner.
C) When you excuse yourself from dinner and head towards the restroom, everyone knows what you're about to do (i.e. it's not a secret), but that doesn't mean there's a camera in the bathroom that records the details of your activities in there (i.e. it's still private). The two are distinct, and privacy, even in courts, can be a good thing. There's no legitimate reason to allow voyeurs tune in to family court proceedings, nor for people's names to be dragged through the mud for crimes they didn't commit. Rather than being concerned with the false dichotomy of "trial by media or trial in secret", why not be concerned with a real problem: that "innocent until proven guilty" rings hollow if your name will forever be tied to crimes you didn't commit?
He probably means a lot of money was wasted putting this guy in jail for a crime that doesn't necessarily hurt anyone else.
I'm sure that there are subtleties here that I'm missing by being an American
Not very subtle - its simply not "trial in secret" by any stretch of the imagination. Journalists can and do report factually on trials in progress. Here's a random example. Just strict rules on what can be reported while the trial is in progress (e.g. no interviews with witnesses, speculating on the outcome, no photography in the courtroom etc.). The facts of the trial are a matter of public record.
...this one just hasn't really made the news in the UK yet.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I'm going to borrow that dinner/bathroom analogy, that's way more useful than the car analogy I was dreaming up.
The Brits don't do it all right (CCTV unleashed, Brexit, etc) but they seem eminently sane when it comes to the courts and even some campaign laws.
making indecent images of children
Nope, no harm at all.
Multiple crimes, and they're actually in the summary:
I'm sure he used a website to do that, but that's not the same thing as saying someone was convicted of "Running a web site" any more than murdering someone is the same thing as "using cash" because the murderer bought a gun with cash.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
A 5 year sentence is completely reasonable for setting up an online marketplace for drugs, especially for a first time offender.
Ross Ulbricht, the original creator of Silk Road got Life+40 years, with no possibility of parole. Essentially the government decided Ross Ulbricht should die in prison. That's a horrendous and a massive abuse of government power.
The murder for hire charges were recently dropped against Ulbricht. It's unclear if Ulbricht was involved in this or not, but the Government doesn't normally drop charges they don't think they can make stick.
Personally I don't believe his lame story about how he got out, then had to get back in again. It doesn't make any sense. Ross has been dishonest about the whole thing from the start, so I wouldn't trust him. But the sentence he got is still just a crime itself. 10 years would be something more reasonable.
I'm going to borrow that dinner/bathroom analogy
Yeah, I wish I could claim credit for it, but I think I picked it up from the professor for an ethics class I was TAing during grad school. It perfectly encapsulates the idea in terms that everyone understands, so it's served me very well over the years.
The Brits don't do it all right (CCTV unleashed, Brexit, etc)
Completely agree. They get a lot of stuff very wrong (as do we, just to be clear), but this is one thing they certainly do better than us.
"It was supposed to stay Dread Pirate Roberts, from person to person."
That only works if the previous one isn't caught and convicted.
All the crap the scumbag did...and gets only 5 years?
And he gets a life-long entry on the Sex Offenders Register and as a result has to notify Police Forces when he changes address and any time he goes for a job that requires a Criminal Record Bureau check his child abuse will show up.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
He didn't kill, rape, hack DNC nor spy for Russians.
Nah, he just took pornographic pictures of kids and put them up on the site. At least that gets him a lifetime entry on the Sex Offenders Register.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
In states where marijuana has been made legal for recreational use, no one selling heroin is considered a drug dealer.
FTFY. Welcome to Seattle.
Have gnu, will travel.
The Swedish do it better. Their constitution guarantees public access to government documents. Keeping documents secret is very limited, and needs very clear justification.
Such privacy can be abused, especially by never actually holding a trial. Review the US prisoners in Guantanamo Bay for precisely what "secret investigations" provide: I'm afraid those have helped justify more terror and abuse against the USA than they've helped prevent, and we still have no evidence of court proceedings for those detainees after years in isolation.
Agreed, hence my use of italics in "temporary privacy" in my last comment. The "temporary" part is important. While privacy is certainly more open than secrecy, it too can be abused, as you said.
Dread Pirate Roberts 3,4,5,6, X,X2,X3...
Police probably will never able to get Dread Pirate Roberts Legends 3
The things is, nobody seems to have reported on this investigation and trial until its conclusion, which suggests non-standard reporting restrictions were imposed.
What were they, and why?
I fully support the normal reporting restrictions but don't like secret courts. I want to know what went on here.
Yes, and we all know that a suspect facing trial for a laundry list of charges never pleads guilty to anything he has not actually done in exchange for a chance at a reduced sentence.
Nope, never happens. Not in the good ol' USA! Why, that would empower prosecutors to simply point a legal shotgun of spurious charges at anyone, guilty or not, and tell them they can get off easy if they just plead guilty to X charge(s)! The USA does not treat their everyday citizens like they were proles in some godforsaken authoritarian hellhole!
Oh, wait ...
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I thought maybe it was a misspelling and that they were a piracy advocate.
The privacy community needs to clean up their act. Outright criminals should not be prominent members.
Beyond the child porn, let's ignore the harm of enabling identity theft worth the wholesale trade in SSNS, credit card numbers and such.
Wait! Liverpool, England is part of the USA??? When did that happen?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Not just that, but that trying to wage a war on drugs is a pointless exercise that only causes more harm than it could hope to accomplish good. Illegal drug users aren't going to seek help, but addicts who don't have to worry about going to jail just might. Never mind the stupidity of putting people in jail for something that causes no harm to anyone but themselves if it even does that. Most of the ill health effects come directly from the low-grade drugs cut with all manner of things that make them more harmful than the drug itself and the inflated prices of a black market lead to additional crime committed in order to feed those addictions.
We've tried doing it this way for how many times now and when did it ever work? Now there's just a vacuum for someone else to step in and even more profit incentive to do so which just ensures that it will happen.
Yeah, that's not what I was answering. The question was what crimes was he convicted of, with a mocking "Running a website" theory posited. I pointed out they were real crimes.
Whether he was guilty or not is another question, but that said plea deals aren't a thing in the UK to the same extent that they are in the US. One can speculate as to his motives, but the chances are he believed he would be found guilty because the evidence was overwhelming, and hoped the judge would show leniency if he plead guilty and avoided a long drawn out trial. There are few other incentives to plead guilty to a crime in the UK.
As to why he believed he would be found guilty, TFA covers some of this. One rather damning piece of evidence is that DPR2 used a key to sign incriminating messages. The private key was found on his computer:
Before anyone claims "He might have been hacked", bear in mind this would have been only one piece of evidence used against him, and DPR2 would have had to have some motivation to plant false evidence against White, which seems... stretching it.
No, he's guilty.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
He's not in the USA, but don't let that get in the way.
No. Lucky this isn't censorship.
I've not investigated, since it's under a different country's jurisdiction (I live, nominally at least, in the same country. For the moment.) with a completely different legal system. But from previous cases I've paid attention to, the commonest reason for suppressing reporting of trial X is that there is also a set of charges resulting in another trial (of the same person, or other people in a related case) still going on, and the reporting of the first trial is suppressed until the end of the second trial and the expiry of the window for lodging an appeal in the second trial.
In this case, for example, Wossname (I've already forgotten his name) was convicted of running a drug-sales website, but he may have been using an accountant to launder the money whose defence to accountancy charges was that he didn't know the illegal source of the money.
People have been jailed in consequence of such false connections, appealed, and their initial conviction quashed (made to not exist) because of contamination of the jury by the first trial by press reporting. Then the cost of the second investigation and trial (tens of millions of pounds, potentially) was wasted. Completely wasted, because of double jeopardy.
A nasty little bigot called Stephen Yaxley-Lennon recently got thrown in jail for repeatedly violating these reporting restrictions. Because the reporting restrictions are about reporting on the trial, not about being in any professional sense, a reporter. He's not an accredited journalist, just a YouTube reject. Specifically, he was repeatedly live-videoing from outside the court room, showing the faces of the accused and relating their alleged crimes regardless of the restrictions imposed because of 3 or 4 linked trials. So, the judge threw him in jail until the trial was finished.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The thing is the reports of the trial/conviction usually also explain why reporting was restricted - if it was.
It's possible that this one wasn't restricted, just never reported on by anybody. The UK press aren't mentioning any reporting restrictions at all. Unless additional references are found I can only conclude Motherboard are being their usual shit selves.
identity theft worth the wholesale trade in SSNS, credit card numbers and such.
The solution to identity theft is not a police state and massive spending on law enforcement.
The solution is to fix the idiotic system where mere knowledge of someone's SSN, CC# and other semi-public information is enough to establish and access credit in their name.
Closest I've been to Seattle is Puyallup. But even there, I felt like there was no expectation that the city would ever cut the grass, there were a shit-ton of homeless people that all looked strung out on heroin. This was back in like 2006. I'm from Alabama and I thought the place looked like a shit-hole of losers.
But then I met the clients that I'd gone out to work for, and they showed me a much nicer side to things. I wanna say they took me to eat at a place named The Rock Dock? It overlooked the water where big ships came in, and across the waterway, were all of the houses of the super-duper rich folks, most of whom started Microsoft. So odd that in most all societies, surrounding a very rich area, is a very poor area.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
"Anyone taking bets on how long it takes for someone to start calling themselves Dread Pirate Roberts 3 assuming it hasn't happened already?"
Hopefully, it will be one using different Starbucks instead of the WIFI of his aunt with his cheap VPN this time.
Ever wondered why the US prisons are full?
It appears our cousins over in limey-land also enjoy the sweet smell of coerced false confession in the morning.
The things is, nobody seems to have reported on this investigation and trial until its conclusion, which suggests non-standard reporting restrictions were imposed.
...or it just didn't make the "news agenda" at the time of the trial. Not every criminal trial makes headline news...
Just because they really are out to get you doesn't mean you're not paranoid :-)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I believe "A Clockwork Orange" described just the remedy you are thinking about.
We've tried doing it this way for how many times now and when did it ever work?
Depends on what you mean by "work". The point of the war on drugs was never to reduce drug use but to give the Nixon administration and excuse to spy and arrest people.
If 'The Dread Pirate Roberts' was caught, then why does his mischief continue? ...Do you understand the point?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
"If 'The Dread Pirate Roberts' was caught, then why does his mischief continue?"
Do the majority of people beleive they caught the wrong guy, or that this is a copycat? That's all that matters.
Ahhh, I guess it's a 'hive-mentality' that doesn't seem to play much of a role in the modern world. ...which is why it's so successful.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.